The invention of bread

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
21

That’s exactly how i felt. This is one I was curious about. But the answer Cecil gave seems to be “They made bread because they already knew how to make bread, because it’s obvious.” Well, not to me it isn’t.

Yeast is easy: Presumably it got in there by accident, and they ended up with something yummy, so they kept some around to make more.

But why grind wheat into flour? What good is flour if you don’t know how to bake yet? Maybe this would be obvious if I knew anything about baking, but much like our pre-agricultural ancestors, I don’t have a clue.

22

Yeah, Cecil could have explained that a little better. The reason you would grind grain is that you had some leftover grain that got dried out. Fresh grain is soft and chewable, but dried grain isn’t. Think about dry rice or popcorn. Soaking it in water will help somewhat, if it trd not too dry, but unless you use hot water, it will take a long time. Smashing it with a rock seems like an obvious solution once you understand the problem.

23

You get unleavened bread. Not as nice tasting or chewable as regular bread, but a good way to convert hard grains into something edible. People ground up a lot of stuff to make it edible. Not just vegetable stuff like grains, tubers and nuts but also dried meat that had been preserved and is now going to be eaten. Cooking with fire goes back to Homo Erectus. The general idea of cooking stuff to improve edibility/taste goes back a very long way.

There are many, many foods whose basic preparation way back then was grind it up, wet it down, cook it.

24

Now that makes sense. I didn’t even know fresh grain was soft and chewable, not having been around it much. I thought of it as hard kernels.

A lot of good information in this thread. Thanks!

25

Another POSSIBLE reason why someone might “invent” grinding things up, is to feed babies.

Overall, in my studies of History for other reasons, one thing I noticed on the side, was that the process of actively trying to invent new things, when life is going along well, is relatively recent. That may be why some things which seem obvious (chocolate chip cookies) had to be invented “manually.”

Even now, there are plenty of stories of “inventions” which were actually chance Discoveries. I can’t recall any cool examples this moment, but I remember lots of examples where someone was trying to fix one concern, and kept getting bad results, and then noticed that something they were throwing away, was actually tremendously useful, instead of being obnoxious trash.

I’m sure lots of food advances were that kind of thing. Leave grape juice undrunk for a couple of days, and it goes sour, and is intolerable. Leave it long enough, and it can (if you’re lucky) turn into wine, and give you a real good time. I’d bet that SOME things which we always cook now, started out as stuff we ate raw, but someone who was done with some food, threw it into the fire to use it as fuel, then a hungry person dragged it back out, and found out that burning it made it more fun to eat. Or some such.

But it’s really all just guess work, since very few people before the modern era, bothered to write down the details of how they discovered something. Lots of very old inventions had to be discovered, forgotten, discovered again and again, until they chanced to be discovered by someone rich enough and with the time available (and the ego required) to write everything out and preserve the writing.

26

Let’s not forget that hunter-gatherers didn’t just pick plant foods and start eating them. Lots of the plant foods that hunter-gatherers used had to be elaborately processed to become edible, or to increase the available nutrients. Edible plant parts often contain toxins, they contain hard inedible parts that have to be removed from the edible parts, and even the edible parts are sometimes too tough to just chew.

And so some types of plant foods have to be cooked to render them safe to eat. Cooking also softens the inedible parts to allow them to be removed and discarded. Or the plant parts are pulverized raw and then separated before cooking, or peeled, or cracked, or rinsed.

For things like acorns they’d have to crack open the nuts, pulverize the acorn seeds, then soak them in several changes of water over several days to remove the tannins. Then you’ve got a wet acorn flour. That could be dried and preserved for later, baked into acorn “bread”, or boiled into mush.

So the mistake is thinking that ancient people saw this wild wheat growing there and decided to invent bread. They already had methods of turning plant seeds and nuts and starchy roots into bread and mush. Wheat was just one kind of seed among many. It eventually became more and more common because it was easier to cultivate and more productive than other types of seeds, until you get to the point thousands of years later where the vast majority of the food you ate in certain parts of the world was your “daily bread”.

The difference between wheat and most other grains, seeds and nuts is that wheat contains gluten, which means wheat bread has a very different structure than acorn bread, rice bread, barley bread, millet bread, maize bread, cassava bread, and so on. A corn tortilla is what you get when you try to make bread out of maize. It doesn’t rise or have the structure of wheat bread. But it’s the exact same idea, the only difference is that it can’t hold CO2 bubbles and so it makes a flatbread.